


inches yet miles (the distance between us)

by unchartedandunknown



Category: Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-22 16:03:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22718626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unchartedandunknown/pseuds/unchartedandunknown
Summary: The five times Inej got injured, and the one time Kaz got injured.
Relationships: Kaz Brekker/Inej Ghafa
Comments: 4
Kudos: 136





	inches yet miles (the distance between us)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Smileyoureoncamera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smileyoureoncamera/gifts).



> Apologies in advance if they’re ooc, I haven’t read soc in a while. Happy Valentine’s Day!

i.

_You were too reckless,_ she tells herself, tightening the bandage wrapped around her arm, enough to feel her circulation cut off. In this moment she is only berating herself, thinking of the moment the man had gotten close, too close, close enough to see the sharpness of his teeth, the wild glint in his eyes.

In the next, she exhales, remembering who stepped in before any harm could be done, cane snapping savagely on the man’s leg, had him stumbling and falling to the ground in a blink.

She remembers trying to say thank you, and Kaz Brekker turning to her with dark eyes, fiercely cold, almost scaring her in a way the man fallen before him could never manage as he said, _I protect my investments._

He expects more from her. She expects more from herself.

Inej rolls down her sleeve and straightens up, poised like she would before a show, about to walk the wire once more.

But that girl does not exist anymore, and there is no room for gratitude in Ketterdam, with its muted spaces and the whites of people’s eyes. Not in words, at least.

Inej vows to get better at fighting, if only to survive.

  
  
  
  
  
  


ii.

Inej has learned to keep herself alive in the small things. She whispers the names of her knives - _Alina, Marya, Anastasia_ \- at night or whenever she needs comfort. Indulges, just for a moment, the hint of the scent of home that catches a passing wind in the streets.

The first time she had gotten injured - a blow to the face and the stomach when she had gotten caught in a bar fight unaware, unprepared in the worst possible way - Kaz had sat her down after in a corner of the bar where they would be left alone for a moment and slid it her way. She stopped its motion and picked it up, unsheathed the hilt.

The knife wasn’t artfully crafted. It was a crude thing made with a purpose, and the purpose was to cut, to kill. She would need to learn how to do that, and she didn’t have a lot of time to learn. She had a better chance of dying before that.

_Never go into a fight empty-handed,_ he said, and left with a knock of his cane and a swish of black.

The knife was a material possession. Kaz only expected one thing of her, and it was to gather intel, and if pushed to fight, survive.

Surviving was a better thing to think about than the killing.

Inej flipped the knife in her hand experimentally. Its weight balanced perfectly in her hand.

The wound on her cheek was still smarting. This was a world that required her to kill to survive.

Inej learned to keep herself alive in the small things. She named the knife after Sankt Petyr, and found that she liked how unassumingly normal it looked, this weapon that could be used to kill. It was not the flashbang of explosive or the smoking glint of a gun, but it would suit her just fine. She would make it suit her.

(Inej had been forced to learn to keep herself alive in the small things.)

  
  
  
  
  
  


iii.

She’s learned to fight barehanded, with both hands tied behind her back. She’s gotten used to the beatings in the back alleys and moonlit meetings-turned-attempted-assassinations.

She has never had to fight in the rain before.

The woman is larger than her, hulking in her vision. Inej blinks back rain as the woman lunges forward, knife a muted flash. She tries to jump back to make space between them.

This is a mistake.

She slips and lands heavily on the concrete, the woman pouncing on the opportunity and slicing open the outside of her thigh, holding her down. Inej kicks back with her uninjured leg, tightens her hold on her knife, and when she finds that moment - where the woman thinks she is easy prey and leans in for the kill, a shadow over her - Inej pulls her forward by the collar and slashes her throat.

She dies on top of her, eyes flickering in bouts, body convulsing. Inej pushes her off and sits up, listening to her own very alive breathing and heartbeat through the pounding rain. She imagines the water washing away her sins, and thanks her saints for allowing her to live another day.

(She is not sure if her sins can be washed away, but as long as she is alive she will repent.)

The sound of off-beat footsteps make themselves known. She opens her eyes to see him looking down at her with a frown, but that’s not any different from usual.

“I don’t suppose you brought an umbrella?” she says, though she’s never seen Kaz with an umbrella, can hardly imagine him huddled beneath one like a bit of rain can stop him. It’s surprisingly difficult to picture.

“If I had an umbrella, I would be using it by now.”

For a moment, she almost has itーthe two of them under a too-small umbrella, suffering through the rainstorm, clearing puddles with leaps, the rain soaking through their shoes despite it.

But that is a dream for another girl, and like all dreams, she lets it slip out of her grasp.

“Let’s get going,” he says.

Inej gets up, steadies herself, finds her own footing through the rain, and leaves the bodies behind.

  
  
  
  
  
  


iv.

“You’re not working today,” he says decisively. Dismissively. Doesn’t even glance her way from where she stands at the doorway.

Inej tries to cover a cough behind her hand. “I’ll be fine.” She winces at the raspiness of her voice. “I can still gather intel.”

“You can barely stand,” he counters, and this time he does look at her from over a pile of paperwork, something cold and unreadable in his eyes. “The Wraith is no use to me if I can hear her walking up the stairs to here.”

It’s a fair point. At this, Inej sneezes, and takes some tissue he offers from a box.

“I’ll get better soon,” she promises, thinking of the debt she owes him, how easily she can be tossed aside.

“You’ll do better lying in bed, resting.”

He doesn’t tell her he hopes she’ll get better soon. The sentiment is useless here, and it would sound insincere coming from him. Still, Inej convinces herself that that was Kaz’s own way of showing he cares.

  
  
  
  
  
  


v.

“You dropped this.”

She turns back to him and blinks, recognizing the familiar crease and colour of the papers, and almost drops the bandage she’s trying to wrap around her forearm.

She lets go of it anyway to take the papers. “Thanks. They must have fallen out during the fight.” She puts it back where she normally keeps them, pressed right over her heart, and resumes bandaging her wounds.

It is much later into the night when she brings herself to ask, “You don’t want to know what the papers said?”

He doesn’t respond for a bit, eyes dragging over the backs of customers.

“It’s none of my business what you do in your spare time.”

It’s comforting, having her own agency over things. She didn’t have that before. She didn’t have anything before.

But she wants to tell him anyways.

Thankful for the din of the bar and the noise of conversation and games around them, she pulls out the letters and unfolds them. He leans forward, still looking uninterested but letting the words on the page sink in.

“They’re letters to my family,” she says. She imagines they’re still out there with their travelling troupe. Maybe they’re searching for her, maybe they’re not. Inej isn’t sure if she wants to be found. Would they accept her as she is now, the person she’s been forced to become and grown into?

(But a part of her wants to see them again anyway. She would like the chance, at the very least.)

She keeps the letters in a box in her room, but these are her most recent ones. Filled with the most recent happenings in her life - nothing explicit, in the unlikely but possible scenario it should fall into the wrong hands - and questions for them to answer, with some answers of her own to unasked questions she imagines them to have.

She has learned to fit the girl she used to be in words on a page.

“There are better ways to spend your time,” he says when he’s reached the end of the first letter - this one is to her father.

But he doesn’t tell her to stop writing the letters, and when she asks _What else can I do to spend my time, then? Educate me_ , he doesn’t answer.

But he does reach forward to read the next letter, and that leaves Inej to wonder if Kaz is like her. They have both been forced by Ketterdam to grow too young, too early in life.

But Inej doesn’t know if Kaz has learned to keep himself alive in small things.

She’s not sure, even, if he’s alive at all sometimes.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“You were too reckless,” she says, leaning back on the windowsill, one leg hanging over. “What brought that on today?”

At this he doesn’t answer, only continues wrapping a bandage around his leg with vigour, and Inej thinks about how much easier it is to read him than when they first met, to see the tenseness lining his shoulders and clenching his jaw with an unknown anger. Because for all the cold Kaz is, he keeps his emotions bubbling just below the surface, rippling over skin like a building wave.

“Didn’t you have a goal you were working towards?” she says when he doesn’t answer, because this is another thing she’s managed to glean; Kaz Brekker has his own agenda. It goes beyond the dregs, beyond their boss and anything Inej understands, and the hate runs deep. It almost feels like hate is too light a word to use for the gravity behind his eyes, light all gone from them.

“You’re right,” he says finally, unrolling his pant leg to cover the bandage. “I have a goal.” There’s something unsaid, an undercurrent of _and I won’t stop until I get what I want,_ and she wonders how healthy this can be, because it feels like it could be an obsession.

There is something festering inside Kaz Brekker, and Inej isn’t sure if she wants to step close enough to see what’s inside.

She thinks Kaz must have surely known kindness at some point. Surely someone treated him well? But then, how did he get to this point?

She isn’t sure if Kaz has ever known kindness in his life, but she’s even less unsure if Kaz has ever been kind to himself. Does he know what mercy is, or is he a monster like all the rumours say? Because in all the times Inej has shadowed him, he has never proved the rumours wrong.

Inej will continue to shadow him anyway. She has a debt to pay, and if there’s one thing she knows Kaz is, it’s true to his word.


End file.
